As a Customer Experience (CX) professional, we are always looking for ways to improve the customer journey and our career growth. One of the most effective ways to do this is to apply Ethan Evans’s Magic Loop approach to your career development. Ethan Evans is a former VP at Amazon with extensive first hand experience of what it means to be customer-obsessed. His Magic Loop approach has helped numerous professionals achieve their career goals. I have adapted his model to add my take on it but of course all the credit goes to Ethan for developing this great model. You can see the full model laid out here. Let’s dive into how you can apply this approach to your own career development.
Step 1: Self-reflection – Are you doing the best job you can in your current CX role?
The first step to applying the Magic Loop approach is simple but critical: Self-reflection. Take a moment to reflect on your current position and assess your career goals, what you want to achieve, and where you want to be in the future. Analyze your CX strengths and weaknesses, which areas interest you, and what you would like to learn and improve. Are you strong in customer survey research? Great dealing with customers one on one? Able to build journey maps? Can you influence team or organisational culture to be more customer centric? Are you good at building CX business cases?
Make a list of actionable steps to achieve these goals and develop a plan with a practical timeline. The more specific and measurable the objectives, the better you will be able to increase your skills and improve your career growth.
Step 2: Experimentation – How can you help your manager?
The Magic Loop approach suggests that experimentation is essential to career development. Ask your manager what you can do to help, then do it. Be open to new experiences, take advantage of networking opportunities, and exit your comfort zone. Try and learn new things, take new courses, involve yourself in different projects, or volunteer to gain new skills. Engage leaders in other functions, gain a broader and deeper perspective of the business. Exploring new areas can help you see opportunities from different perspectives, allowing you to utilize various perspectives to solve problems more effectively.
Step 3: Make sure you implement
Whatever your manager asks, take it on, get it done. After this experimentation, evaluate your experience and knowledge. Reflect on the new skills you’ve learned and explore how they can be used to enhance your career development. Analyze whether the skills align with your career goals, the challenges you faced, what you enjoyed, and what you found challenging. Use this feedback to adapt your plan and determine what steps you need to take to continue your learning journey.
Step 4: Ask your manager how you can develop further so you can advance your CX career
The final step is to collaborate with your manager to advance. Use the evaluation feedback to improve your plan and reinforce your strengths. Identify what areas you want to improve and focus on learning new skills relevant to your career goal. Seek feedback from your manager, colleagues and other leaders, and identify gaps between your current skills and your career goal. Use this feedback to tailor your personal development plan so that it aligns with your career goals. This feedback loop mirrors the one that many of you are responsible for in your organizations, the customer feedback loop.
Step 5: Do as they recommend to improve your value.
Again make sure you take on their recommendations and stretch yourself to demonstrate your value as a CX pro, take on a new challenge that will grow your competency and contribute to the business.
Step 6: Advanced Magic Loop. Suggest your own ideas!!!
Ethan recommends for those who are more advanced in their careers that they recommend ideas.
You could use language like this to suggest an idea, “I noticed that we are becoming a little too internally focused and sometimes we forget to get customer input. I’ve been thinking we could get the team’s input by running a simple customer-centric culture assessment to gather everyone’s view. Would that be helpful?”
The most successful CX professionals we know have taken on the challenge of influencing their organisations level of customer centric culture. What better way to have impact than to help change the environment within which your organization operates!
In fact as I am writing this post, there is a team of awesome CX professionals enrolled in the Masters of Customer Experience Management at Michigan State University currently undertaking their own projects to determine their organizations’ level of customer centricity.
For them it is a great way to get their senior leaders involved in a conversation while providing valuable data on how they benchmark versus the best and uncover the hidden factors that maybe stopping their organization’s growth.
Repeat this Magic Loop!
Conclusion:
Ethan Evan’s Magic Loop approach is a proven way to build your career. Its cycle is designed to encourage movement and improvement. As a Customer Experience (CX) professional seeking career development, using the Magic Loop approach can help you achieve your goals and reach your true potential. The Magic Loop approach will allow you to assess your current career position, encourage experimentation, assess your learning experience, and reinforce your new skills while closing the gaps.
So, take that first step today, and start experimenting, why not try the MRI Benchmark, a customer-centric culture assessment tool, and witness the magic of the loop approach unfold in your career!
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